A family bet

Can a family show attract audiences? ABC hopes so.

September 20, 2009|By Scott Collins, Tribune Newspapers

It's late on a hot afternoon in August, and the producers of the new comedy "Modern Family" (8 p.m. Wednesday, ABC) are debating panties.

The crew is shooting a scene on a Century City, Calif., soundstage with Ty Burrell, who plays Phil, a suburban dad who can't stop embarrassing himself. At the end of a complicated spat, Phil winds up covered in women's underwear as his wife walks in.

Watching the scene on a nearby monitor, Christopher Lloyd, who once ran "Frasier" and is the co-creator and executive producer of "Modern Family," thinks there may be too much lingerie. He wonders if they can do another take to make the scene-stealing Phil look less like, well, a panty-loving pervert.

"We're already doing enough weird stuff with this guy," Lloyd said.

Indeed, "Modern Family" has to tread a fine line between weird-funny and weird-weird. It's intended as a family comedy, but it also has to make a strong impression on viewers. It has a lot more riding on it than the usual sitcom. The series will serve as the anchor of ABC's risky effort to rebrand Wednesday as its new comedy night. The other entries are also family-themed, including "Hank," with Kelsey Grammer as a downsized CEO, and Patricia Heaton as a harried suburban mom in "The Middle."

"Modern Family," though, is grabbing the most attention. The pilot tested so highly among focus groups that in May ABC executives screened the episode to a crowd of advertisers in New York, where it drew favorable reactions.

But few new shows face such a tough battle against prevailing programming trends. Family comedy? Come on. Those things went out with "Malcolm in the Middle." Thanks to cable and the Internet, families today just don't watch TV together anymore. The grown-ups watch "30 Rock" or "How I Met Your Mother"; the kids watch "iCarly" or "SpongeBob SquarePants." It's also no secret that Americans' conception of what constitutes "family" has broadened considerably since the white-picket-fence mythos of "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave It to Beaver" reigned in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The producers of "Modern Family" seem to realize the enormity of their task, but they're hoping ABC can be patient. "It's going to take a while for people to hear about us and come to it," Steve Levitan, a tall, affable Midwestern native who made his fortune with "Just Shoot Me" and who is now Lloyd's creative partner, said in his office.

He added, "I think we'll probably get our butts kicked in the ratings for a while."

"Modern Family" is an ensemble show set in three households. Phil, a real estate agent, and his wife, Claire (Julie Bowen), have the traditional nuclear family. There's a gay couple, Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), who have adopted a baby. And then there's Jay (Ed O'Neill, who played Al Bundy in "Married ... With Children"), a man who's trying to throw off the indignities of late middle age by taking a trophy wife (Sofia Vergara).

The pilot's secret, which the producers had hoped to preserve until the premiere, is that these people are related. Claire and Mitchell are Jay's grown kids from a previous marriage.

But ABC decided to give away the secret in because research showed that otherwise viewers thought "Modern Family" was an anthology and felt less compelled to watch.

Steve McPherson, who runs ABC's prime-time entertainment, said he wanted viewers to have the same reaction hearing about the show that he did when the pilot was pitched. "When [they] told me they were all connected, I was like, 'Sold! We've got to have this show,'" he said.

Levitan said he and his colleagues believe the show has plenty of other qualities that help it stand out. Chief among them: the use of a "mockumentary" storytelling style, a la NBC's "The Office."

"Modern Family" tries to find most of its humor in the margins: throwaway comments, offhand gestures and a well-fortified sense of irony. In that, it strongly resembles "Arrested Development," the Emmy-winning sitcom about a wealthy and very warped clan that never managed to find a sufficient audience on Fox but has become a DVD hit.

Levitan understands the comparison but sees a difference. He argues that too many recent comedies are "distancing." That is, they invite the audience to laugh at, but not necessarily identify with, the characters.

"We embrace the emotion," Levitan said. "What really gets an audience is, yes, you have to be funny, but people have to care about the characters and the relationships."

Since the start of commercial TV in the late 1940s, such shows have played a key role for the networks -- and especially the studios, which have relied on lucrative syndicated repeats of sitcoms for much of their revenue. From "I Love Lucy" and "Leave It to Beaver" through to "The Cosby Show" and "Everybody Loves Raymond," family comedies were especially valuable because, the thinking went, they had something for everyone, at least one identifiable character every viewer could relate to.

But beginning in the late 1980s, network executives stopped wanting to reach everyone. They became much more enamored of young-adult viewers, because those are the people whom advertisers believe are most likely to buy new products. So schedules became filled with comedies such as "Friends" and "Seinfeld."

More non-traditional sitcom families made their onscreen: Take CBS' smash hit "Two and a Half Men," which is about a swinging bachelor living with his uptight brother and the brother's young son.

This season, the trend toward unusual clans intensifies. In addition to "Modern Family," CBS' "Accidentally on Purpose" has Jenna Elfman as a 30-ish writer who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and decides to keep both the baby and the man. Fox's "Brothers" looks for laughs in the spectacle of two grown brothers -- both lifelong rivals -- pushed by their family into a shaky truce.